As soon as watching video games became popular, people started asking: is this helping or hurting the industry?

The logic as to why "Let's Play" videos or Twitch streams might hurt a game's overall performance is, at the very least, sound — after all, why would someone need to spend $60 on a game when someone on YouTube is just going to post the entire thing online? Not only that, but today's video game coverage is all-encompassing — it doesn't matter how tiny or obscure your video game is, someone is going to post their playthrough online.

However, it seems as if video game broadcasting isn't as harmful as people first thought — in fact, a new study shows that Twitch streaming can actually help boost a game's sales. In a post over on the site's official blog (via PC Gamer), Twitch Data Scientist Danny Hernandez released his findings on both game retention and sales boosts following broadcasts.

As it turns out, people watching someone play a game online tends to lead to an increase in purchases — and in some cases, these boosts can account for more than 20 percent of a game's sales.

It's important to know that, while Hernandez certainly did his homework, there are a few estimates to take into account. Steam never actually releases sales numbers, so there's no way of knowing exactly how many copies were sold — at this point, educated guesses are the best that anyone can hope for.

Even so, it's hard to argue with Hernandez's findings. Games like Punch Club and The Culling both saw huge sales increases following a spike in popularity on Twitch, and even older titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Team Fortress 2 saw a boost in purchases. It's not a universal rule — there are sure to be a few games whose fortunes don't change after a Twitch stream — but the wide variety of different games and genres seems to indicate that streaming services aren't a threat to sales numbers.

What's even more surprising is that this success isn't solely thanks to big-name streamers: mid-tier channels (who broadcast to anywhere from 33 to roughly 3,000 viewers) reportedly account for 46 percent of all Twitch-based sales. This seems to suggest that it really doesn't matter who is streaming the game — having a high-profile streamer showcase a game certainly won't hurt, but the only thing that really matters is that someone is playing the game.

At this point, the report seems to be nothing but good news. Gamers clearly love playing with other people, even if that's through a chat window — and from the looks of things, developers both big and small are seeing the benefits.

It'll be interesting to see how the industry reacts to this news. Twitch has already become a huge part of both how gamers play and how publishers market their games — some titles even come with Twitch chat integration built into the game itself. Now that there are some hard numbers to back up Twitch's claims, it's easy to assume that we'll be seeing even more live stream integration as gaming hardware continues to evolve.

For a full write-up on all of Hernandez's findings, head on over to the official Twitch blog.

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